NYPA set to make John Dyson chairman – again

The New York Power Authority board of trustees is set to name John Dyson its new chairman Tuesday morning in White Plains.

Dyson in the 1990s when he ran for U.S. Senate

The state Senate is expected to confirm Dyson’s appointment to the NYPA board today after he was nominated back in January.

Dyson was previously NYPA chairman in the Carey and Mario Cuomo administrations and was Commerce Secretary when the iconic “I Love NY” tourism campaign was created.

He’s also had some public gaffes.

The New York Times wrote this story back in 1994 when Dyson was deputy mayor in New York City:

John Dyson, Upstart From Upstate, Speaks Up (Again)

By ALISON MITCHELL
Published: July 03, 1994

It was a John S. Dyson kind of moment.

Gov. Hugh L. Carey was in office and Republican state legislators were complaining about the appearance of Mr. Dyson, the 34-year-old Democratic Commerce Commissioner in “I Love New York” ads promoting New York State.

Suspicious that Mr. Dyson was promoting himself as well as the state, the lawmakers were considering legislation to bar the appearance of state officials in publicly financed ads. And Mr. Dyson, mocking it all, showed up to be questioned at a legislative hearing in a black Lone Ranger mask, prompting a Republican walkout.

It was the gesture of a man who never wanted to be a faceless bureaucrat, a commissioner with such a penchant for the flamboyant gesture or outrageous quote that even admiring former colleagues still groan that if there is a propeller he will walk into it, if there is no controversy he will create one.

And last week, Mr. Dyson, now 51 and a deputy mayor to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, struck again, in a dispute with City Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi over whether a company owned by a black woman should be rehired to market New York City bonds.

“The Comptroller ought to know the difference between a bid and a watermelon,” he said to The Bond Buyer, in a remark that was denounced by many Democratic officials as racist or offensive and revived questions about whether Mr. Giuliani’s administration is insensitive to blacks.

Mr. Dyson apologized, saying he had not intended to be offensive, but was trying to compare something “fixed and firm like a bid” to something he considered “soft and mushy” — Mr. Hevesi’s contention that two financial advisers could be used to market city bonds for the same price as one.

“Upstate we say about someone whose head is mushy, that he has a watermelon for a brain,” he said. “It is not a racial remark in upstate New York. I didn’t realize, in fact, how intensely it had become such a thing in New York City.”

Dyso, who also had a failed U.S. Senate bid, is now chairman of an investment firm in Dutchess County.